Greece spends €1 billion a yr on pro-child insurance policies

It has one of many lowest fertilities within the area—at par with different international locations peeved by the identical concern, like China and Japan—which the Greek prime minister has referred to as a “ticking time bomb.”

Delivery charges within the nation have persistently declined yr after yr, with 2022 marking a near-century lowest.

The federal government is now taking motion to avert a attainable demographic decline because the economic system ages and the necessity for labor grows. 

Final week, Greece introduced a collection of measures to assist raise its delivery charge by way of extra childcare advantages and tax breaks for folks. 

The European nation spends €1 billion a yr on selling childbirth, Reuters reported, and already gives incentives corresponding to maternity advantages and allowances on child objects. The brand new measures are a part of the federal government’s plans to lift delivery charges. 

However efforts to encourage folks to have extra kids will likely be in useless with out financial boosts that go hand-in-hand with it, as Greece is the European Union’s second poorest nation. So the nation additionally introduced an increase in pensions and minimal wage from subsequent yr.

A mix of social and financial components explains Greece’s predicament. About twenty years in the past, an financial tailspin plunged the nation into deep debt and austerity, dwarfing Greeks’ employment prospects and resulting in their emigration for higher alternatives overseas. Whereas Greece has seen its inhabitants ebb and stream by way of wars, it misplaced its most expert expertise throughout the monetary disaster. These have created far-reaching results, together with the nation’s labor scarcity and the continuing demographic decline.

The Greek economic system is in a greater place at the moment, having grown 2% in 2023; nevertheless, remains to be considerably smaller than in 2007. Challenges like excessive unemployment and inflation proceed to impression the choice to begin and develop households. An getting older inhabitants may additional strain its economic system, which already has a excessive debt burden.

It may be laborious to interrupt out of a pattern intrinsically tied to folks’s lifestyle.

However at the very least Greece shares its complications with different international locations corresponding to Italy. Russia is going through a demographic decline, too, albeit for various causes triggered by its Ukraine invasion. 

Hungary is going through the same conundrum. It’s providing loans of €30,000 in addition to subsidies to folks within the hope that they’ll contemplate rising their households. 

In the end, reversing the social material in international locations doesn’t occur in isolation—it’ll want financial and monetary insurance policies to be in lockstep.